No Mirrorless - Should we be worried...??

At the recent CP+ show in Yokahama Japan, DPREVIEW spoke with senior executives from all of the major camera and lens manufacturers including Canon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Ricoh, Sigma, Sony and Tamron.

All spoke about mirrorless cameras becoming soon the norm, That is 'all' except Ricoh who "appeared uninterested in talking about mirrorless development".

Should we be worried...??

End of the dSLR as we know it

Mirrorless cameras are not the norm, phone cameras are.

DSLR and mirrorless cameras will continue to become more specialised products, just as medium format used to be compared to DSLR. More consolidation in the range offered and the number of players is inevitable.

Worried ? If I was worried i would not have bought the Pentax DS 12 years ago. What will be, will be.

I wonder whether a variant of the forthcoming Ricoh 'GR III' with an interchangeable lens adaptor for Pentax lenses and weather sealing would be practical.

This has already been discussed to death in another thread and you took part in it Why have you posted yet another useless thread?

A lot of people are switching from Sony A7 etc to Pentax K-1 because the Pixel Shift is so good. This includes excellent photographers like Michiel Schierbeek. He seems to have had a lot of excellent lenses by Zeiss etc. converted to K Mount... Links to his website are in his posts here ......

https://www.getdpi.com/forum/pentax/58612-fun-images-taken-pentax-k1-14.html

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Many apologies if there is another recent thread concerning this. If so I wasn't aware of it. More so I wasn't aware I'd posted in it.

However the article in DPREVIEW was only 1 week ago so thought it worth a mention. Personally I do think it a little worrying that Ricoh appear to have no plans to develop mirrorless cameras. Like them or not, I think EVF's are the future. I sincerely hope Ricoh/Pentax don't get left behind.

I thought I saw some data on camera sales recently which indicated that the decline in dslr sales had flatlined, and that mirrorless camera sales were now in decline.

Did I imagine this or has anyone else seen it. :

Mirrorless aren't recorded separately. The sector includes... compact system cameras, rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lens and interchangeable unit cameras.

They did show good growth, but are still only 54% of DSLR sales in units and that's for the whole sector. A lot of mirrorless sales will be to people buying 2nd/3rd/4th cameras or cameras for video or just buying because they are plain daft

DSLR's fell by about 10% in units or 3.6% in revenue which is why prices have to rise.

Source Camera & Imaging Products Association PDF.

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When you think about it If half of DSLR owners bought a mirrorless out of curiosity or for video.......true mirrorless sales would actually be zero

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If you think about it Ricoh are playing a blinder as every one is jumping on the band wagon for mirrorless it meets there is some stiff competition out there and something will have to give there could be some years in the market as some will doutedly disappear due to cost and there profit margines

Both cannon and nikon are only just entering the mirrorless market, wether this is a strategy we will never know.
Cannon announced recently they would not be concentrating on their core camera business. To the amusement of some people.
However as soon as they had made this statement , rumours of a full frame cannon mirrorless started.
1 thing is clear, nikon and the mighty cannon do not have the resources of the giants panasonic and sony.
So maybe a wait and see strategy was a good one.
I still dont see why pentax cannot be a manufacterer of ovf and evf cameras,although they will need some unique selling propsition to make their mark in csc market.
As for pentax weakness , they are not the only manufacterer with poorer af tracking and slower video although little is made of this by reviewers.

Regards

Historically Canon, Nikon, Pentax were manufacturers of optically based camera equipment whilst Sony and Panasonic have their roots in electronics - TVs, video recorders and all the other fads which came and went like Walkmans, and are treating the photography business in the same way; just another disposable fad. They rely on the likes of Zeiss to produce decent glassware. Olympus, Leica and Fuji have an optical heritage but in compact rangefinder models so it makes sense for them to embrace mirrorless. The electronics giants are going to push hard for their sector to expand but for me a company with a strong optical heritage wins every time. The electronics can be bought in but photography relies more on the design and quality of its optical components; anyway years ago I had a Sony TV and it was rubbish so I am biased!

I seem to remember reading the same thing when digital photography first started and everyone jumped on the bandwagon except Pentax who just put it down to being a fad.

They never did catch up.

Nikon refused to make an FF DSLR for years (initially saying they wouldn't as there was no need). Don't forget the development & purchase costs then were huge - my Pentax EI-2000 (2Mp 'DSLR' with fixed zoom) cost more than a K-3ii does today. The technology was moving very quickly, the EI-2000 lasted about 3 months before being replaced by the EI-3000 (3Mp). Pentax would have needed very deep pockets to compete (the EI-2000 was a joint venture with HP).

On the flipside Sony have more support for 3rd party lens manufacturers than Pentax now does. By all accounts, most new lenses for Pentax are made via license/partnership with Tamron?

There's a real risk of letting company endevours from 30+ years ago influence or opinions today too much.

Exactly. The buying public are fickle. They'll see other manufacturers with mirrorless models, but not Pentax. They'll read all the mirrorless camera tests in the monthly magazines and not see Pentax. Rightly or wrongly they'll see lack of a mirrorless model as little or no ambition or even the technical expertise to produce one.

I very much doubt if mirrorless will turn out to be a fad. Optical viewfinders, especially Pentax optical viewfinders, are extremely good, but they have probably reached their pinnacle. They are probably as good as they can be. Whereas Electronic Viewfinders are good now..... but they'll get even better.

If Pentax drop out of the race now, they'll never get back in.